Everything We Know About Running Was Discovered in 1937

The most prolific winner in Boston Marathon history was also its most prescient. Clarence DeMar, who won Boston seven times between 1911 and 1930, was a self-coached but systematic and inquisitive runner. In April 1937, DeMar—who also won a bronze medal in the 1924 Olympic marathon—espoused his views in a memoir titled Marathon. Written long before a participatory running culture in the United States existed—“How does it feel to run a marathon?” is the title of one chapter—Marathon is aimed at the 1930s reading public, to whom the idea of running 26.2 miles was akin to flying an airplane around the world: a risky venture attempted by few. Yet some of his theories on training and exercise in general presaged what would become accepted practice generations later.

DeMar, who was separated from his family for much of his childhood, was a typesetter by trade. Despite his hard-scrabble upbringing, he was an intellectually curious man who earned an undergraduate and master's degree as an adult and later taught industrial arts at the Keene Normal School in New Hampshire. (The DeMar Marathon, held annually in Keene for the past 37 years, is a tribute.)

DeMar was opinionated, which makes his book lively, and he had a temper, particularly in the midst of a race. He was known for taking swings at spectators who broke his concentration during the course of the BAA Marathon—where his consistent victories inspired Boston reporters to dub him “Mr. DeMarathon.”

Matt Rainey

Much of Marathon, the book, is devoted to DeMar's assessment of what worked (or didn't) in his preparations for marathon, the race. “He listened to other people's advice,” says Alan Stroshine, race director for the DeMar Marathon, who has read much about the man and met some of his descendants. “He would try different things, but he recognized that we're all different, and he always seemed to go back to what worked for him. I think that's a good lesson for any runner.”

Unlike books such as George Sheehan's Running and Being or Jim Fixx's Complete Book of Running, which were bestsellers and helped spark the 1970s running boom, Marathon appears to have had little impact. It was reprinted years later; a used hardcover edition is currently available on Amazon for $27.

While some of what he rails at are moot topics nearly 80 years later, DeMar's observations on what he calls the “problem of getting into condition and staying there,” make the book seem as freshly minted as this year's Boston Marathon finisher's medal.

DeMar ran Boston for the last time in 1954 at the age of 65 and died of stomach cancer four years later. Can the advice of this long-ago champion help you in your preparation for your next 10K or even “DeMarathon?” We posited some of his ideas to experts today to analyze:

Illustration by Charlie Layton

Demar on Footstrike“My whole attitude is that whether one shall run on his heels or his toes is hardly worth discussing. The main thing in distance running is endurance and the ability to get there as quickly as possible.”

In college in the early 1900s, DeMar tried out for the cross country team at the University of Vermont. The first day of practice, he recalled in his memoir, the coach watched him run and yelled at him, “Run on your toes, your toes!” DeMar says that it took him a long time to get the hang of it, and he later decided to go back to his natural heel-striking gait. He concluded that running on your toes might be a “trifle” faster, but was more fatiguing—and irrelevant to success in the sport.

Today's Experts
“His point is well-taken,” says Heather K. Vincent, who has a doctorate in exercise physiology and is the director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville. “We've focused so much on what part of the foot hits the ground and not as much on how you land and your overall form.”

DeMar lived in an age before Newtons or online debates about barefoot running form. But he believed that success in running was less about where your foot landed than about how you finished. The result of an analysis of 940 runners in Vincent's lab has led her to a similar conclusion. “If you try to change your gait to fix one little thing and you've had no problems before, that's when you get in trouble,” she says.

Rather than just the foot, look at the overall form. “What we're finding is that the people who are injury-free have a nice soft landing, and they are able to keep their joints in alignment,” she says. “Whether they hit with heel, midfoot or forefoot is not as important as whether they have control over the movement.”

If you feel you don't have control over your running motion—if you are a hard striker who slaps the ground with your feet—training your balance and strengthening the hips and glutes, as well as a gait analysis, can help, Vincent says.

Illustration by Charlie Layton

DeMar on Accumulating Mileage“I used to get up at four many mornings and run a mile up to our [World War I] Victory Garden, run back, take a shower and breakfast, then run to the train and afterwards from the train to work. My condition for running improved.”

DeMar's announcement that he intended to do a training week of 100-plus miles in preparation for the 1927 Boston Marathon was considered newsworthy enough to rate a story in The New York Times. How did he rack up the miles without breaking down? And as DeMar had a full-time job and a family, how was he able to build his training around the rest of his life? His answer: integrate running into his daily routine. Long before public health officials talked about the importance of engineering more activity into one's lifestyle, DeMar was doing it on a daily basis. He eventually built up to a total of 12 miles of running a day, in work clothes, to the various print shops where he worked around Boston—in addition to long training runs on the weekends.

Today's Experts
“I'd totally recommend something like that,” says Dena Evans, a coach in Redwood City, California. “For most of us, part of the key to success in running is figuring (out) how it makes sense in context with the other stuff in our lives.”

Evans, a mother of two children, integrates running into her daily routine. “I'll run to the bank, about two miles away, make a deposit and run back,” she says. “I'll run loops around the field while my kids are at soccer practice.”

All it takes is a little imagination and opportunism, just as DeMar used his runs to tend to his garden. “If there are ways to be creative about it and minimize the impact on other priorities, it's a win-win for everyone,” Evans says.

Illustration by Charlie Layton

Demar on Diet During Marathon Training“While running and sleep are the most important things [for marathon success] from my point of view, from the questions many people ask, you’d think food was. … My experience is that we humans don’t need to be so fussy. … Very likely the balance [in terms of protein, fat and carbohydrates] is there in a simple home diet, so well that if we fussed with it we wouldn’t make the proportion much better and we might take all the joy out of eating.”

In 1911, after winning his first BAA Marathon, DeMar was approached by physician John Harvey Kellogg (of cereal fame, although it was his brother who actually made that business successful). Kellogg ran a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan, and espoused various health beliefs, among them the value of vegetarianism. He asked DeMar if, as an experiment, he would commit for one year to a vegetarian diet that Kellogg would prescribe. DeMar agreed and dutifully followed the regimen, although he felt little difference in his running. When he won a marathon in Brockton, Massachusetts, later that year, the doctor crowed to the press that it was because DeMar had followed his diet—in particular, Kellogg's recommended prerace breakfast of (no, not Corn Flakes) oranges and pine nuts. “I probably would have won anyhow,” DeMar wrote. “And if the experiment had any scientific value, it was simply to show that a person could have plenty of endurance without meat for some months.”

DeMar soon returned to his normal “balance of simple food” and maintained that, when it came to diet, every runner was different.

Today's Experts
“I agree with what he said about balance and about the differences between individual runners,” says sports nutritionist Tracy Stopler, M.S., R.D., of Plainview, New York. “Some really do run better on empty; others need a lot of carbs. You have to individualize.” While she notes there are many health benefits to be accrued from a plant-based diet, you don't have to be a vegetarian to be a successful runner.

Stopler, who works with many endurance athletes, stops short of a full endorsement of DeMar's view, however. She points out that what might have constituted a “simple, home diet” in his time is very different from the way Americans eat at home, when they do eat at home, today. “There was no McDonalds in 1937,” she says. “There were less processed foods. Everything was homemade. I would love to see the current generation go back to that tradition.”

Living in a world of microwaved and takeout foods, today's runners probably do need to be a little “fussy” and pay closer attention to what they're eating. But if we returned to fresh ingredients and meals our grandmothers would recognize, then perhaps DeMar's advice would still be sound.

Illustration by Charlie Layton

Demar on Distractions And Focus“I sometimes feel that the whole world is divided into … those who pay attention and accomplish things and those who distract attention and are infernal nuisances. The runners are paying attention and the rest of the world is mostly trying to distract them.”

DeMar is candid about his notorious temper and what he called “the fear and hate in my heart” when he raced.

“In less than a half a mile,” he said, “I began to feel very tense. … The mental difficulty of keeping my body at the task was such that the one thing I dreaded was interruption or distraction of any kind.”

DeMar tried to analyze his mental state while racing. This was a man who also taught Sunday school and was a scoutmaster, so at least in some parts of life, he demonstrated patience and calm. “Was the fear increased because I was running; or did I run better because I was afraid?” he wondered in print. “Ask the psychologists, I don't know.”

So we did.

Today's Experts
“There are some athletes who don't want a pat on the back; they want a kick in the behind,” says Michael Sachs, a sports psychologist at Temple University. “They want to be told they're not good enough, that they can do better, and that spurs them on. DeMar may have been in this group that motivate by fear.”

As for DeMar's observation on distractions, Sachs agrees. “That's applicable to runners today. We, the runners, are out there and trying to better ourselves. The rest of the population seems to be sitting on the sidelines, and in some ways they may be annoying.”

One can only imagine how DeMar would have reacted to runners on phones during a race. If you find such behavior irksome, tune it out. “You are in control of your thought processes at any point,” Sachs says. “You just have to say, ‘I'm not going to let this derail my race.’”

Or you could use it, like DeMar, to fuel your fire. Just don't go taking a swing at the runner taking selfies in the middle of the race.

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